“Just swallow it,” he kept repeating, trying to persuade her that accepting the alcohol he was force-feeding her was the best way.
He didn’t specify if it was the best way for her or for him, but by openly assuring her that she was about to die he was showing entirely new behavior from Tasha’s past experience. She tried to think of anything at all that he might do to get himself out of the trouble he would be in if anyone ever learned what he had done here today, but she realized it would be impossible for him to explain it. In just these few minutes, things had already gone too far for explanations.
She thought again of his matter-of-fact tone of voice when he’d answered her trembling question by confirming that, yes, he was going to kill her all right. Try as she might, Natasha couldn’t think of a single reason to disbelieve him. Not during the next two or three minutes while he continued to force the alcohol into her, and not when he decided to go to the next stage of his plan of activities to make her feel better and dragged her to her feet, forcing her to stumble blindly down the hallway. When she felt him turn her to the right, Tasha knew that they had entered her mother’s bedroom. The one with the pleasant mess scattered around on the dresser, testimony to Claire as a working mother with little time for cleaning off a dresser no one else was supposed to see anyway. The photo of Natasha’s beautiful smiling face sat in its elaborate wooden frame, reflected in the mirror next to the little ceramic Doberman puppy and the tiny man made of silver wire, swinging forever back and forth on his balancing bar.
Natasha imagined herself reflected in the mirror as he shoved her down into a seated position on the bed. Her cuffed hands braced her from tipping over backward. Her fingers could feel the familiar touch of her mother’s bedspread. It was the only thing familiar to her in this haunted-house nightmare of distorted sensations.
Her father pumped a little more alcohol into the tube, but this time the pumping didn’t last long. Robert Peernock was a list maker, an itemizer of objects and activities; at this point he still had plenty of items yet to check off on his list of objects and activities designed to make Natasha feel better after being strangled.
His hands left her body. Briefly, the hope ricocheted through her that he would leave the room, maybe leave the house. But the hope never had time to fully form. All he did was lean over and turn the radio on. An FM station was preset to play classical music, the way Claire liked it. Robert left it tuned to that station. Now Tasha’s encounter with her father in her mother’s bedroom had some refined musical accompaniment.
He got up, but he still didn’t leave her. A moment later Tasha heard her mother’s closet door open. She tried to quell the panic, struggling to think clearly. What could her father be looking for inside her mother’s closet? The answer came flashing back: of course. The closet wasn’t only her mother’s.
Though Robert had moved out years before, he still kept a large presence of himself in the house. His files, office records, tools, clothing, and personal objects were scattered everywhere like voodoo tokens guarding the house from another man’s intrusion. The bedroom may have been used only by Claire now, but as a wave of nausea twisted Natasha’s insides she remembered that Robert had things in the closet too.
He had guns in the closet: a shotgun, a revolver. He kept plenty of ammunition in the closet. And as he emerged he didn’t keep her guessing about what it was he had been rummaging around to find. She heard it, right next to her ear: click-click, snap … click-click, snap … that would be the revolver, the black six-shooter with the wooden handle.
Her father was holding the barrel of the gun at her head and pulling the double-action hammer back, rotating the bullet chamber, pulling the trigger. She didn’t know if the gun had any bullets in it right now or not. But she knew there were bullets in the closet. Plenty of them.
Up to this point Robert had been a man of few words, but now he apparently felt it was time to speak again.
“Natasha …”
Click-click … snap.
“If you don’t cooperate with me …”
Click-click … snap.
“I’m going to—”
Click-click …
“Blow your brains out.”
Snap.
Tasha couldn’t answer; the tube was still in her mouth. But she did the next best thing. She sat quietly and offered no resistance. Robert didn’t like resistance. Things had been great between them when she was still a little girl and accepted his authority unquestioningly. She had always told her friends that he didn’t begin to hate her until she developed into a willful young woman—and started putting up resistance.
And now her plan worked, in a way. He didn’t begin beating her. He just went to the next item on whatever checklist he was working from and took steps to make sure she wouldn’t be offering any resistance, whether she felt inclined to or not.
He pushed her onto her side, knocking the tube out of her mouth. He pulled her feet up onto the mattress and quickly tied her feet together with rope. She couldn’t see the rope but she could feel the bristles against the skin of her ankles.
And now it would seem that the next item on Robert’s list was to hog-tie Natasha like an animal being prepared for slaughter. A moment later she felt her father roll her over onto her stomach and yank her feet behind her, all the way up to her wrists. Then he tied the rope that was binding her ankles to the chain between the handcuffs.
And still Robert was at no loss for ideas. Tasha felt the stiff tube jammed through the mouth hole once more and again forced between her lips, far back into her mouth. She heard the friendly little pumping sound, tasted the harsh liquor as it began to dribble into her mouth. By now she knew better than to try to spit the alcohol out. He was in no mood for resistance.
“Swallow it, Natasha,” Robert commanded, no doubt feeling sure that here at last was a teenager a parent could deal with. “Swallow it. It’s the easiest way.”
She had to swallow some of it now, but still she tried subtly to let some of it leak out around the edges of the tube and onto the fabric of the hood. At first Robert didn’t notice, he was busy giving her further orders.
“You need to cooperate, Natasha. It’s very important.”
Click-click … snap.
“You and your friends like to get high? Well, I’m going to get you drunk. In fact, I’m going to get you and your mother both drunk.”
Click-click … snap.
“Then she’s going to sign some papers. And if you’re a good girl, Natasha, and if your mother does exactly like she’s told, then I’m going to finally be able to get out of your life forever. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Hey, don’t spit that out! Swallow it!”
Click-click …
“Or I’ll blow your brains out right now.”
Snap.
Tasha began to swallow the alcohol. All of it. There was no more resistance left in her.
CHAPTER
4
It was 6:00 P.M. on the day the crimes began when Tina Nussbaum left for the evening. She didn’t know that Claire Peernock’s daughter was already bound and gagged inside Claire’s bedroom, but as Claire’s boss at a property management firm in West Los Angeles, she knew that Claire was staying behind at the office to catch up on some late work. That was nothing unusual. Claire always tried to book as much overtime as she could; Tina had known that about her when she hired her as a secretary five months earlier. Since that time, Claire had often been the last to leave at night, but she never seemed to abuse the overtime privilege. Once the work was caught up for the day, she always locked up and went home.
They had become friends of a sort, and over time Claire had gradually confided her marriage difficulties to Tina. Speaking in her soft voice and delicate French accent, Claire told how she had nearly gone through with the divorce before Christmas, but Robert had urged some kind of a six-month “cooling-off period” for reasons of his own.
The whole thing about a cooling-off period or any kind of possible
reconciliation seemed odd to Tina, since Claire made no secret of the fact that Robert had been living with his girlfriend throughout that time and that he kept his youngest daughter with him whenever she didn’t have to stay at Claire’s to attend her grade school across the street from the house. Claire seemed relieved that this coming weekend the girl was to return to her home and get ready for the new school term on Monday.
Tina knew the deadline on the temporary hold in Claire’s divorce action was only nine days away. Then Claire could begin to officially disentangle her life from a man she described as causing her so much fear and unhappiness.
It was good to see Claire determined to get her house in order. Claire had an easy laugh and a playful sense of humor. She never showed any outward signs of depression over her situation, but Tina could guess at the amount of pain it would take to cause her friend to work so many long hours. The overtime was Claire’s only way of creating a financial cushion thick enough to make sure that once her divorce began, she wouldn’t have to fear being unable to provide for her children.
So Tina left feeling relieved to know Claire was finally about to get away from the clutches of a man who seemed to have caused her so much hurt and given her such reason to fear him.
Of course, she had only heard Claire’s side of the story. Tina was a fair-minded person, so as she walked out to her car she reminded herself that there was no way of knowing for sure if Robert was really as dangerous as all that.
Once Robert finally got Tasha to accept the alcohol as it flowed down the tube, he seemed to tire of the game. After another few sprays, she felt him walk away. Then everything got quiet. She didn’t hear Robert close the bedroom door as he walked out, but it felt somehow as if he had. She lay helpless on the bed, hearing only the delicate music on her mother’s bedside radio and the hammering of her own pulse in her ears.
By that point the amount of alcohol he had forced down her wasn’t all that much, so she could still think fairly well despite the liquor and the emotional shock of the attack. But as she began to try to weigh out the situation, it was clear to her that she was no longer physically able to help herself; the hood was tight around her neck and she was still hogtied. Even if she could somehow make it over to the bedroom window, there was no way to climb out and certainly no way to run. The room had a phone, but she couldn’t move toward it without making noise. It would be impossible to dial. Even if she reached someone, he would surely hear her speak. Wouldn’t he kill her instantly?
She was going to have to hope for some kind of outside help.
Tasha lay quietly while her thoughts screamed through her. She tried to guess how much time had gone by, knowing that it had probably been between 5:30 and 6:00 when the attack began. Perhaps another half hour had passed since then. Her mother could be home from work at any time after six o’clock, but she almost always worked overtime whenever she had the chance. That meant Claire could come walking into the house in a matter of minutes or a matter of hours.
But even if she came home right away, Robert’s idea about forcing them to get drunk and coerce Claire to sign some papers didn’t make much sense. Claire didn’t drink to any degree. If Robert actually thought he was going to get her to sit down and knock back a few stiff ones, he was badly mistaken. To get alcohol into Claire he would have to more or less repeat the situation with Natasha, taking her by surprise. He would either have to do it as soon as she walked into the house, or, by posing as being there late in the evening on some errand, maneuver her into some position for a surprise attack. Tasha knew Robert would never get Claire to drink with him voluntarily. And certainly she would never sign anything simply on his demand, not without putting up strong resistance.
So if Claire came home alone, as she almost always did, what defense would she have against a surprise attack from the man she still trusted enough to allow him open access to her home?
The classical music pieces on the radio seemed to go on forever, making it hard to gauge how much time was passing. By the time one would end she didn’t have any idea how long it had played. Sometimes another would come on without the announcer ever saying a word and it would play for an entirely different length of time.
But she was sure he hadn’t left the house. He could never risk having his daughter found there like that by Claire or Patty or anyone else. No, he was somewhere nearby. And whatever he was doing in some other part of the house right now, she had no doubt he would be back.
Eventually the edge of the mattress sank down again under his weight. Fingertips played at the base of her neck as he untied the hood, pulling it back up over her face and off her head.
Then Robert’s face was there, right in front of hers. She met his eyes, searching for some connection that might tell her there was an end to this in sight. But she found nothing, no hint of compassion, no trace of doubt about what he was doing. He had launched into some kind of plan and showed no hesitation. The expression told her she could forget any hope that he might falter or reverse the course he was following now.
“I can’t feel my hands anymore,” she said softly.
He regarded her for a moment, wondering, perhaps, if she was going to try anything funny. But then, Robert had control now.
He released the handcuffs and untied the rope that held her feet back against the cuff chain. Keeping her ankles tied together, he lowered her feet to the floor and pulled her arms around to the front, then fastened the cuffs again. But they weren’t as tight this time. They didn’t need to be. He had control to spare.
He held up a small glass full of amber-colored liquor. “Drink up,” he ordered, businesslike, a stern bartender suggesting some original concoction.
Tasha held the glass and sipped without fighting, but she had trouble getting it down. It was the same stuff that had dribbled down the tube, and the strong liquid kept gagging her. She turned her head for a second, trying to shake off the taste. The blue canvas hood caught her eye as it lay on the bedspread. She could see the plastic tube still wedged into the mask’s small mouth hole and saw for the first time that the tube was red in color. Teeth marks covered the mouth side of the tube. She realized that she must have chewed it nervously while Robert was out of the room.
But Robert pulled her gaze away from the face mask, taking her by the chin and holding the glass of liquor in his outstretched hand. “Come on, just cooperate. Drink it.”
She got about half of the glassful down before she began to choke on it. This time Robert didn’t push her to drink more.
“That’s okay.” He pulled the glass away, apparently satisfied that things were going as planned. But before he set the glass aside he produced a small oval-shaped white pill and put it between her lips. “Swallow it,” he ordered, offering her one final sip of the liquor to wash it down. The fresh burst of fear that washed over Tasha quickly dissolved into resignation. If he was going to poison her now, there wasn’t anything she could do to stop him. It might be better than the gun, anyway. She wondered if he could have gotten his hands on cyanide. Didn’t cyanide have some special kind of taste to it? But whatever taste the pill might have was covered over by the alcohol. In another second the pill was swallowed down.
Robert set the glass down on the nightstand. When he moved out of her line of vision she got a quick glimpse of the spray bottle resting there as he set the glass down next to it.
A moment later he picked up the hood, pulling the leather strips so that the bottom of the hood was wide open. He moved closer to her with it. She didn’t bother lifting her cuffed hands to stop him; in seconds it was back over her head. And then everything was dark again. She felt the thin leather laces dig into her flesh as they were pulled tightly against her throat. He pushed her back over onto her side and walked out of the room, leaving Tasha to count her heartbeats by the throbbing in her throat. If he had indeed given her some kind of a drug, she felt no effect so far. The fear coursing through her must have beaten back any sense of being under the influence.
<
br /> But if the pill was really some kind of poison, she wondered whether she would feel anything before it killed her. She lay quietly, searching her senses for any poisonous reaction. Minutes began to crawl by. Five … ten … fifteen. Time thickened.
She became aware of Robert nearby again, felt him pour more alcohol into the tube. It was easier to swallow, now. Soon he was gone once more.
The silence inside her became warmer as the music on the radio drifted up and down. It reminded her of some faraway boat bobbing along on the ocean, way off on the horizon. Natasha drifted with the boat, floating toward some destination she couldn’t begin to imagine, letting the current carry her along, helpless to do anything to alter its course. At some point an announcer on the radio gave the time: eight o’clock. Still, nothing happened. Nothing changed.
Until Robert’s voice stabbed her.
“Don’t make any noise!” he hissed. The sharp jolt shot through her electrically. She was instantly awake, her heart slamming, every sense wide open. Her father was there, right over the bed. He had come out of nowhere.
Her hearing had been sharpened by the blindness forced upon her. She picked up the difference in his voice right away. The volume was soft but his tone was harsh, desperate. She realized that something must have gone wrong with his plan. Something had entered into the situation that he’d never counted on.
Then her heart leapt into overdrive. Of course! Patty was there, it had to be her. Tasha’s breath began to heave in her chest like that of a sprinter pushing for the finish line. It must be Patricia. Instant gratitude flowed through her for whatever wisdom had kept her from revealing her plans for the evening when Robert asked about them.
And now her best friend was there to pick her up! Patty must have gotten tired of waiting for her to call and just decided to come on over. Help from the outside: her only hope had just become Robert’s worst nightmare.
A Checklist for Murder Page 4
